DisastersHome Depot faces lawsuit over Joplin, Missouri tornado deaths

Home Depot is being sued in a wrongful death lawsuit by a woman who lost her husband and two children during a 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri.

As Insurance Journal reports, Edie Housel is contending that Home Depot is responsible for the death of her family due to the improper construction of the Home Depot store in which the three — along with five other people — were killed.

Housel specifically states that the 100,000-pound concrete slabs that hold up the store’s roof were not secured and collapsed after the tornado ripped the ceiling out from the building. All but 10 of the 73 concrete fixtures fell inward onto the floor and were responsible for the loss of life.

Housel filed the lawsuit in May in the Jasper County Circuit Court, but the case was later moved to the U.S. District Court’s Western Missouri District. It names in the case not just the company of Home Depot, but also the property owner HD Development of Maryland, Inc. and Casco Diversified Corp., the designer of the structure.

All three of the defendants denied the allegations, and referred to the EF-5 tornado (winds above 200mph) as an “act of God.” At the time of the accident, the storm had winds of around 165mph, “plus or minus 20 mph,” according to National Institute of Standards and Technology study.

Additionally, about thirty people survived in the building, because the panels fell outward, the study concluded.

In response, the Tilt-Up Concrete Association formed a committee to look into the incident and whether the building had been improperly constructed.

Their probe found that the structure was “actually overbuilt” when erected in 2001 under the then-current 1996 BOCA basic Building Code, which required that it be able to withstand 70 mph winds.” In reality, the Joplin Home Depot was designed and built to handle 90 mph gusts.

Even more notably, this particular store even had a reinforced room within, for the purpose of being a storm shelter.

“What we’ve said all along about building the reinforced room is that we don’t hold our facilities out to be storm shelters, but we felt it was appropriate given the events of the past at this store and the sentiment of the community,” said Home Depot spokesman Stephen Holmes.